Tutoring Reflection 4, 3-10
Greetings,
This past week, I was given a choice between tutoring two sets of students. One pair asked to work with me. The other pair I was asked to work with. I chose to work with this second pair, despite their lack of apparent lack of motivation, due to their need for supervision with the material.
While working with these two students Leonardo (whom I have worked with before), and Tom*, I had an important lesson in time management and organization. There were two pages to this particular assignment, and I allowed them to start on separate pages. This, I realized about 30 minutes into the class, was a major organizational mistake. While answering Tom’s question on the first page, Leonardo was stuck on a question on the second page. Since Leonardo has troubles concentrating, this created some havoc as he would turn around in his seat and talk with other students, disrupting both myself and the other students. One possible solution would have been to focus more attention on Leonardo, to keep him focused on the task at hand, and attempt to teach him methods of figuring out how to answer the questions properly. This would have been detrimental to Tom, who would have suffered from this attempt of pushing Leonardo to perform to his maximum potential.
A better option, in my opinion, would have been to structure our group better. Instead of letting the students begin on different problems, I should have started them on the same page. This would have allowed me to show Tom and Leonardo how to figure out the problems and kept the situation more under control. This would have reduced the stress on me, especially when another pair of students joined us later in the class and I was forced to answer the same basic questions that I had answered for Leonardo and Tom.
Although it seems to be a fundamental idea, and one that is very easy to grasp, I failed to understand how significant the tactic of starting everyone on the same page. This caused both stress on myself, and the classroom as a whole as I was forced to constantly switch gears and still maintain some discipline with the students surrounding me.
*Pseudonym used
